Hesperis tristis

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Hesperis tristis, photographed by Patrick Hacker — fig. f Patrick Hacker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197765925

Hesperis tristis, photographed by katunchik — fig. g katunchik, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193587546

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession: US 127363
Filed as: Hesperis tristis L.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: -- Richter 1883-05
Origin: HU
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 14 botanical countries

Native distribution of Hesperis tristis, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Austria	AUT	EUROPE
Bulgaria	BUL
Central European Russia	RUC
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
East European Russia	RUE
Hungary	HUN
Krym	KRY
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Romania	ROM
South European Russia	RUS
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Ukraine	UKR
Kazakhstan	KAZ	ASIA-TEMPERATE
North Caucasus	NCS

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 73 in flower of 89 examined

80%

92%

72%

Proportion of examined Hesperis tristis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	4	5	80%	38% to 96%
Apr	46	50	92%	81% to 97%
May	23	32	72%	55% to 84%
Jun	0	2	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Hesperis tristis observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 73 of 89 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 514 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-7.0 °C	-3.7 °C	0.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.2 °C	25.8 °C	27.4 °C
Annual rainfall	446 mm	596 mm	731 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	86 mm	104 mm	133 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 514 research-grade observations of Hesperis tristis that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 8 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Cheiranthus lanceolatus Willd.
Crucifera tristis E.H.L.Krause
Deilosma tristis Spach
Deilosma tristis var. atropurpurea (Borbás) Dostál
Hesperidium triste Beck
Hesperis desertorum Velen.
Kladnia tristis Schur
Sperihedium triste (L.) V.I.Dorof.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.